Cheeky Monkeys: Steam Lunar New Year Sale Is On

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Happy Chinese New Year! We’re now in the Year of the Monkey, and Valve have realised this is a fine opportunity for another sale. Like the Gregorian New Year sale which ended ooh just over a month, the Lunar New Year Sale doesn’t have daily deals, flash deals, games, or any of that guff which confuses and frustrates people who don’t want to watch check Steam every 12 hours. No, you’ll simply find 9,279 things on sale.

The sale started on Friday, after we’d clocked off, and will run until 6pm (10am PST) this Friday.

But how will you find good games without flash deals to catch your eye? Follow our Steam curator page to see some games we’ve dug, or maybe the Discovery Queue is a bit less rubbish now, or listen to trusty fellow readers (hello you in the comments!) who I’m sure will recommend bargains. Heck, our winter sale recommendations still mostly work – only now Spelunky is even cheaper and Pillars of Eternity is a touch more expensive.

Valve have seemed pretty pleased with this sale format, saying it helped smaller games and got people digging deeper rather than simply checking the latest deals on a timer. I suppose they’re also training people to use parts of Steam they’d like us to use more, all year round. Me, I’m glad I don’t feel a need to keep checking in, and don’t go looking up on sites to see if a game’s already been in a flash sale or what. There are games on sale cheap, and I can buy them if I want. You know, I think I just might.

My #1 wanted Steam feature: The ability to block curators, and preferably weigh all the stuff they approve of negatively when it comes to my discovery queue. I’m not talking about RPS, obv.

Anyway, sales. I got AssCreed: Black Flag, the first AssCreed I have gotten since trying to play the second one, since so many say it is the best one. Might even download and fire it up, once I’m finished with XCom 2, The Witness, Divinity: OS EE, and Pillars of Eternity with the expansions. So early next year, probably.

I definitely don’t need to see a joke recommendation from an epic le meme XD “curator” every time I look at a game. I also would be interested if certain games have notes from the curators who take note of games that work well on a tablet while I couldn’t give a shit about the 30FPS police. I imagine there’s a bunch of people who are the opposite to me in regards to which of those two curators I just mentioned matter to them and it would make sense if we could both see what we wanted rather than a luck dip of whatever Steam thinks is more relevant.

Yeah, I think current popularity is weighed a bit too heavily in the recommendation algorithms in Steam, both for games and curators. Amazon had that problem too earlier, no matter what you bought you got page after page of recommendations for different editions of 50 Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci code. If lots of people like it you have to be interested, right!?

These days Amazon also allow you to exclude purchases in your history from recommendations if you don’t like the result, would be nice if Steam had the same. Just because I play Dota 2 doesn’t mean I want a hundred recommendations for free-to-play MOBAS and MMOs in my discovery queue. Look at the hundreds of single player RPGs and point&click adventures I have bought instead please, Steam.

The best deal in my opinion is the ‘F1 Game Franchise Bundle’, all of codies F1 games for the price of one basically. Several hundred hours worth of content for the racing fan. The Project Cars and MotoGP 16 deals are also very good.

The Assetto Corsa deal is OK, its one of the best sim racing games around, but the content is somewhat meager compared to Project Cars. Still, if you prioritize physics its an awesome game.

Stock Car Extreme is another great sim game but is not actually on sale, so I don’t get why its even included in this promotion.

Elite Dangerous for €14 is crazy, I’m gonna buy it for my brother.

I only have 8 games on my Steam wishlist, most of the games I want these days are on GOG and similar sites.

The thing I most want from steam is searching by exclusion. E.g. let me exclude things that are tagged as Adventure, Multiplayer, 8-bit, Survival, Zombie, Third Person, Early Access or already-rejected-by-me.

I think this would be much more useful than positive searches on tags, because a tag on things I like such as Roleplaying or Stealth will still produce games I mostly don’t want.

DFS (old name was “Direct Furnishing Supplies”) is a nationwide British sofa and soft furnishing retailer who are notorious for having endless sales throughout the year, “It’s the DFS Christmas Sale!”, “It’s the DFS New Year sale!”, “Spring Sale!”, “Summer sale!”, “It’s a Tuesday sale!”, “Someone just sneezed outside one of our shops sale!”, “Martin our account manager has just had a poo sale!”. Seriously I think there is only a period of 7 seconds at 1:03am on every 5th 29th February when they’re not having a sale… and I think they celebrate that fact by having a sale.

– Toothache Day Sale (Feb 9th)
– the Valentines Day Price Massacre (Feb 14th)
– International World Thinking Day Sales (Feb 22nd, looks like it will be canceled due to lack of participation, though)
– Floral Design Day Sale (Feb 28th)
and
– Leap Day Sale (Feb 29th)

I like having frequent sales, because then the chance´is higher that a game I actually *want* will appear on sale. Its a better system for consumers who have a very specific taste in franchises and sub-genres.

Okay, I’m glad to see this is actually happening and I’m not hallucinating it. The only lunar calendar among the major players is the Islamic one, and that year won’t end until October. Judging from the whole “monkey” thing, I’m assuming they mean the… um… calendar of that nation between Korea and Tibet. This leaves me wondering- did I miss something? Is “Ch*nese” a bad word now?

You’re just reading this a little too hard. FYI there is in fact a Chinese lunisolar calendar which is still used informally among the Chinese community to mark Chinese holidays, and the Chinese New Year is just passing today. “Lunar New Year” came to associated with Chinese New Year within some of these communities, so the choice of word makes sense in context.